Wynne Godley, who died last week, wrote half a dozen pieces for the LRB. ‘Saving Masud Khan’, published in 2001, was ‘the story of a disastrous encounter with psychoanalysis which severely blemished my middle years’. A year earlier, he wrote a piece about the fragility of the US economy in which he observed:

It seems fair to conclude, at a minimum, that the high level of debt now poses a risk.

The central idea of the Maastricht Treaty is that the EC countries should move towards an economic and monetary union, with a single currency managed by an independent central bank. But how is the rest of economic policy to be run? As the treaty proposes no new institutions other than a European bank, its sponsors must suppose that nothing more is needed. But this could only be correct if modern economies were self-adjusting systems that didn’t need any management at all.